MsMaryMalone wrote:You should try Cat's Cradle and Welcome to the Monkey House. Both are quite amusing.
Isn't
Cat's Cradle the one that ends with all the Earth's water freezing solid, and Bokonon giving God the finger as he dies? If Dragonlily doesn't like Vonnegut because of his nihilistic cynicism (my choice of words for what 'pessimism doesn't begin to describe'), I don't think that book will improve matters much.
Slaughterhouse-Five has a claim to be called Vonnegut's best work — it is at any rate
representative of his best work — but I found it singularly unappealing. The chapters set in Dresden after the bombing are written with a terrible intensity that makes the rest of the book seem better than it is. The science-fictional conceits are so-so. And although it's superficially clever, I soon wearied of the famous rhetorical device by which Vonnegut renders
all loss and death insignificant by equating the greatest with the least. A man finishes his beer and throws away the empty: So it goes. Millions of people are slaughtered in an obscene holocaust that calls into question the whole fitness of human civilization to survive: So it goes. Guilt by association: trivialization by banality. Not my cuppa, I fear.
'Harrison Bergeron' is one of my favourite SF short stories, but even it has that leaden core of despairing cynicism beneath the mordant glitter of the surface. Vonnegut reminds many people of Mark Twain; me, too, but the bitter and misanthropic Twain of
The Mysterious Stranger, not the passionate and humorous Twain of
Huckleberry Finn.
Without the Quest, our lives will be wasted.
)
